ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that human subjects do exercise ingenuity, creativity, and even responsibility in putting the product of concepts and categories into service in their goal of achieving meaningful connectedness with their world. It looks at approaches to the self derived from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Heidegger felt that the problem of skepticism arises from the presupposition of a distinction between inner experiences and external-world objects. Hegel and Heidegger stress the connection between the interpretation of self and the interpretation of world. Heidegger introduces a note of caution into the Nietzschean dance with his notion of the self, in the form of the They, as a "crossing point" of cultural systems. The adoption of the feminist philosophical stance, however, entails a commitment to taking responsibility for a variety of philosophical positions, each of which could be established by an individual epistemic subject only on the basis of that subject's place "in the whole net of human interdependency".
